The latter is one of the reasons why people who stop smoking often gain at least a little weight; smoking will temporarily make people feel slightly less hungry. However this is hardly a reason to start or even to continue smoking. Nicotine also causes a rise in blood pressure and heart rate within a minute of smoking. High blood pressure can be dangerous to your health - as can just about everything else related to smoking.

There are more than 4,000 separate chemicals which have been found in cigarette smoke, none of them which are good for the body. In fact, science has basically come to the conclusion that - particularly for children - the only safe exposure to cigarette smoke is no exposure whatsoever.

Smoking during pregnancy is linked closely to lower birth weight in babies (and thus often lower health) and there is a suspected link between smoking in the home and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.

Also, smoking of any kind has been shown to cause lung cancer, as well as to contribute to bronchitis, emphysema, and asthma. It can also cause “chronic obstructive pulmonary disease,” (COPD) not to mention cancer of the mouth, larynx, kidney, bladder or pancreas.

Part of how the lungs function is through the action of tiny hair-like bodies called cilia, which move and help the lungs eliminate irritants, small particles, mucus, and so on. Smoking can paralyze these cilia and then the only way that a smoker can clear the lungs of these irritants is to cough. (Hence the famed “smoker’s cough.”)

The fact that nicotine is a stimulant to the body and brain is also one of the reasons why when people stop smoking, they often find it difficult to concentrate for a few days. This side effect soon passes, and is easier to deal with if you use tools that are available to you such as hypnosis and Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP.) It’s not the effect of not smoking so much that is the problem if someone truly wants to be a non-smoker - it’s the meaning and interpretation that the person puts on what they are experiencing that becomes an issue – and that often causes smoking relapses.

In fact, a study of over 72,000 people (both Americans and Europeans) completed at the University of Iowa showed that hypnosis was the most effective method – bar none - to stop smoking. On average – hypnosis was over three times as effective as nicotine replacement methods and 15 times as effective as trying to quit alone. (Journal of Applied Psychology, University of Iowa, “How One in Five Give Up Smoking,” October 1992. New Scientist October 10, 1992)

According to a study published by the Harvard School of Public Health, (Majid Ezzati, PhD; S. Jane Henley, MSPH; Michael J. Thun, MD; Alan D. Lopez, PhD, Role of Smoking in Global and Regional Cardiovascular Mortality) “More than one in every 10 cardiovascular deaths in the world in the year 2000 were attributable to smoking, demonstrating that it is an important preventable cause of cardiovascular mortality.”

There simply is no safe way to smoke cigarettes. Although smoking is highly addictive physically, behaviorally, and emotionally, many millions of people around the world have used hypnosis and other tools to become and remain smoke free. No matter how addicted to smoking you may be (or think you are) a combination of support and the proper tools can break nicotine’s hold on you.